I'm not sure you get the point of urban planning like this. The long-term goal for city planners is to increase public transport options/routes/capacity to reduce car numbers in the city. Then free up additional city space from cars to have civic squares to encourage commerce. Without beating the horse more than it already has; Amsterdam old vs new is a great example.

Dublin City Council has said a plan to build a pedestrianised space where Grafton Street meets St Stephen’s Green won’t progress until there is more certainty on the long-overdue rail system.

Work on the €2.4 billion metro rail link between Dublin Airport and the city centre is due to begin in 2021 for completion in 2026. It includes a proposed stop at St Stephen’s Green, where passengers would be connected with Luas services.

Seems reasonable. No point in constructing a nice civic area if a subsequent rail link to the airport means it has to be ripped apart afterwards. They're not cancelling the civic space, just holding off until the metro north link (which is more important to the city) has been fully planned out.

Incompatibility of chargers for mobile phones is a major environmental problem and an inconvenience for users across the EU. Currently specific chargers are sold together with specific mobile phones. A user who wants to change his/her mobile phone must usually acquire a new charger and dispose the current one, even if this is in perfect condition. This unnecessarily generates important amounts of electronic waste. Harmonising mobile phone chargers will bring significant economic and environmental benefits... Consumers will not need to buy a new charger together with every mobile phone.

I would argue that any organisation can live or die by a culture of competition/fear/loathing. Jobs literally hung a pirate flag above a building to put the fear in another division of Apple. As far as I can tell (as an outsider), Apple's R&D has typically been a secret society that's hyper competitive against different factions within itself. It's helped drive a culture of fast innovation and quick turn-arounds when developing very new or iterative tech.

Cook is a phenomenal CEO. His performance shows that. But so was Balmer. The comparison has been criticised but it is fair. Balmer steered Microsoft through some of it's most profitable times, shipping products that millions used. But there was no product vision or scope for growth beyond install-base upgrades.

Apple's on a similar road. They're not attracting enough net new customers, but instead they're relying on their existing install base and placing some (very smart) bets on emerging markets where possible (India, China). But give that enough time and it'll stall.

But they need some visionary product person to step in to do more than just attach touch screens to stuff. Not necessarily as CEO. Cook is steering the financial ship well there. No need to rock that particular boat. But they need a bullish visionary who can see 5, 10, 20 years into the future and start to design & work on the things we don't even know we need yet.

It should be seen less as a burden & more a repatriation of profit to the society that you gain from. Income tax is there so that your earnings in the country you reside & benefit from contributes to said society to help pay for health, infrastructure, education, etc.

Companies are no different. It's not a burden to benefit from a country by residing in it & then contribute back in order to maintain a healthy, educated workforce that can get a cheap train ticket to commute in the morning, etc. etc. etc.

Yeah, their away form has been abysmal this season (though their home form is pretty decent, though all they do is defend for their lives). But that doesn't take away from a 5-0 drubbing. We also played really attractive football, which has been unusual this season thus far!

Robben is currently way ahead of James in terms of getting a start. But it's absolutely inevitable that Robben will pick up an injury. That or Heynckes gets selective about the types of games Robben/James partakes in (one being a super sub during CL games, for example).

Müller is Heynckes' golden boy so there's no competing for his spot outside of fatigue/injury.

I got married last year and never got a specific watch to celebrate. So, finally, here it is. It joins my lovely Omega Speedmaster, Seiko 5 & Nomos Tangente in la familia!

Absolutely love it, and being a new watch it's not been off my wrist at all over the last two weeks outside of the gym/bed!

Decided to get this instead of the bracelet version because the Speedmaster scratches that itch already, and I love the look of the aged leather strap. Incidentally, leather tends to irritate my skin; but luckily no such issues with this bad boy.

Anyway, feel free to ask any questions about it. It's the first time I've bought a watch brand new from a jewellers directly (Nomos came from the website & the Omega came from a jeweller via Chrono24). Incidentally, the jeweller is Weir & Son's in Dublin, Ireland (http://weirandsons.ie).

Ditto. I'm itching to play, and the PC version just dropped in price. But my job involves a lot of travel, and I'm about to embark on a few months' of fairly consistent flying around the world so this would be perfect.

Apologies, I used 'nVidia' as an example because I also have a PC with their chipset inside. But the point is the same; depending on when AMD release new hardware, that will more likely determine the timeline for a new PlayStation.

But that said, AMD/nVidia aren't going to do anything particularly magical for vendors. The chipsets might not be specifically available anywhere outside of the respective consoles, but they're based on some technology that is. e.g. PS4's GPU is based on Radeon GCN 1.1 using "Bonaire" chips.

Lots of chatter here about the software exclusives as an indicator of when Sony will refresh. That's nonsense. Look at hardware. They need the hardware world to upgrade far enough beyond the PS4 Pro specs and have costs low enough to justify a ~€500 market entry price.

My guess is 2018 will be par for the course, and 2019 will be our first hint of new hardware with a release in 2020. I'm basing that on the coming Intel generations and how fast/slow nVidia have been releasing new chipsets.

While aesthetics are important - it's one of the reasons people buy Apple products - it's also awkward. There's no way to lay the phone flat on a table without it having a wobble.

Keep in mind we're talking about a design team that put fake screws on one side of a MacBook to give uniformity in design (the screws on the other side held a plate that kept the HDD in place). Then, to remove the screws altogether they designed a unibody shell. i.e. I don't think it's wildly unreasonable for designers at Apple to obsess over this kind of thing.

Woosh, that camera protruding out is ugly! I've never been too bothered by it in the last few iPhone iterations, but I'd love Apple to innovate here and design around the fact that camera lenses are large.